Romulus Buckle & the City of the Founders (The Chronicles of the Pneumatic Zeppelin, Book One)

by Richard Ellis Preston Jr.

  “Any damage?” Buckle asked.

  “Just a skin tear,” Max replied. “Number two is shut down.”

  “Good old Smoky,” Buckle grumbled.

  Max pressed her gun-maneuvering lever up, pitching her and the turret forward so that the long barrel of the hammergun pointed almost straight down. Once the turret rotated into firing position, it was exposed to the outside air: the freezing wind battered her seat in its unkind but familiar fashion. She peered down the aiming sight, scrutinizing the snowbound landscape below. The cannon barrel was fully retracted, so it wasn’t much of a sighting. She would not be able to extend it out to operating length until after they landed and then ascended again.

  Her spine tingled. She loved operating the cannon, firing it, stalking any prey she could find. Martians were predators. The visceral charge of the hunt burned so hot in Max’s half-Martian veins, she wondered how a full-blooded Martian could stand it.

  THE ART OF THE BOUNCE

  SABRINA SAW MAX SWING INTO the hammergun turret and grinned inwardly. She always felt safer with Max on the gun. Max was deadly. And Max loved it, even if she would never admit to loving anything.

  An odd pang struck Sabrina’s gut, the sort of random emotion—rare for her—that came out of nowhere when one was completely occupied with some other task. This was a weird sort of sadness. Max was Sabrina’s sister—in name only, for they were both adopted by Balthazar—but they had never been close. They had shared books and taken classes at the Academy together, but they had never sat together at the dinner table. They had never shared a secret.

  “Fifty feet,” Sabrina said. “Landing zone directly below. Magnolia and Hollywood Way. Rate of descent thirty feet per minute. Attitude zero degrees. Drift at one degree port bubble.”

  “Helm compensating,” De Quincey said.

  “Dead slow,” Buckle ordered, ringing the chadburn device as he cranked its handle.

  “Dead slow, aye!” engineering responded, along with the ring of the chadburn bell.

  The roar of the propellers steadily decreased.

  The piloting gondola hummed with the silence of expectation. The rudder and elevator wheels creaked ever so slightly as De Quincey and Dunn nudged them back and forth. A cloud of steam passed beneath the glass under Sabrina’s feet, driven by a light tailwind from the exhaust vents at the rear of the gondola.

  Sabrina eyed the array of intricate metal gauges, cranks, dials, and levers around her, observing the static-inertia meter, a palm-sized glass orb of clear liquid encased in copper, where two large bubbles measured the Pneumatic Zeppelin’s horizontal and vertical level. The liquid was seawater “boil,” a solution of distilled phosphorus algae. The boil would glow at night if one pressed the button to tap the agitation hammers within, thus disturbing the algae and making it generate bright, eerie bioluminescent swirls of greenish illumination. All of the vital cockpit instruments contained boil.

  Sabrina heard Max cooing in the chattertube. Martian females had soothing voices, and cooed when they were pleased with themselves: it was a pleasant sound, a sort of a mix of a cat purring and a dove warbling. Max was a master of the coo because she was usually amused by herself and annoyed by everyone else. It was also her version of laughter, unless one could really get her splitting her sides. Sabrina could remember seeing Max laugh like that only once, when Sabrina was seventeen.

  “Pleased with ourselves, are we, Max?” Buckle said, also aware of the cooing.

  The cooing stopped. “Just be careful with my airship, Captain,” Max replied, her voice hollow but loud over the chattertube connection. As far as any crew member was concerned, the Pneumatic Zeppelin was “my airship.” “Another hole would surely ruin my day.”

  Buckle leaned in to his chattertube mouthpiece and shouted, “Eyes up! Wait for the signal!” He pulled his saber down from its gargoyle pegs and clipped it to his belt.

  A signal flare rocketed up into the sky directly in front of the zeppelin’s cockpit dome, leaving a curling trail of black smoke until it popped, its burning magnesium casting an intense white arc as it floated down and disappeared into the bones below.

  “Signal flare sighted,” Sabrina commented dryly. “Thirty feet to ground.”

  Welly spun a hand crank. “Lowering static lines,” he said.

  “Pluteus sighted!” Max’s voice rang in the chattertube from her position in the belly turret. “Ten o’clock low.”

  Kellie barked, her tail wagging, ears bolt upright.

  “Right on time,” Sabrina said, nodding her approval as she eyed the copper-winged clock at her station. And sure enough, here came Pluteus B. B. Brassballs and his twenty-man company, filing through the snowdrifts, rubble, and bones. They were close, but Pluteus and his Crankshaft clan troopers, referred to as the “Ballblasters,” were never easy to see: the soldiers wore dun brown and white to match the dirty snow, and dulled the brass on their rifles to prevent them from gleaming in the diffused sunlight.

  Pluteus and his men were the closest thing the Crankshaft clan had to an army, an uneven collection of brawny ne’er-do-wells who excelled at the art of war, infantrymen who traveled light and struck hard at any target Admiral Balthazar Crankshaft ordered them to hit.

  Pluteus and his Ballblasters had been hunting for a Gallowglass clan airship that had reportedly crashed in the Boneyard a week before. The troopers carried pressurized tanks, hoping that they could locate the wreck and tap whatever precious hydrogen might be left in the reservoir tanks before the yellow-fingered Scavengers tore everything to shreds. Hydrogen was lighter than air, but in the Snow World it carried more weight than gold.

  And now, with great suddenness, both the Ballblasters and the Pneumatic Zeppelin had been called upon to embark on a mission that verged on suicide.

  “Prepare to take the passengers aboard with all good speed,” Buckle ordered.

  “Ten feet to ground,” Sabrina announced.

  Buckle ducked back inside the gondola, snapping his telescope shut and tucking it back into his hat. “All stop,” he ordered, leveraging the chadburn dial to its vertical slot.

  “All stop, aye,” engineering repeated, ringing the chadburn bell as their sister dial matched the first.

  Sabrina heard the whirling propellers go silent as they wound down to a lazy roll. Low as an earthworm’s balls and just as slow. Her stomach felt like there was a rock in it.

  “Be ready to bounce,” Buckle told Nero through clenched teeth. “I’ll want air and I’ll want it precipitously.”

  Buckle hated being on the ground like this. So, for that matter, did Sabrina.

  “Ready to bounce. Aye, Captain,” Nero replied.

  “We stop for nothing after this,” Buckle grumbled.

  “Airspeed zero. Hull at ground,” Sabrina said.

  Kellie started barking. It wasn’t a good bark. The hair jumped on the back of Sabrina’s neck.

  They were at their most vulnerable position. Stalled, with the gondola hulls floating a mere three feet off the ground.

  And then the shooting started.

  BLACKBANG MUSKETS AND HARPOONS

  BUCKLE, HEART RACING, JUMPED TO the port gunwale and looked out. Scattered puffs of black smoke erupted from the blasted ruins surrounding them, bursting from rubble piles, burned-out vehicles, and doorways. Blackbang musket balls left long, sparkling tails of burning phosphorus and corkscrewed as the projectiles lost speed, and they looked to Buckle like a swarm of burning bees. Sharp plinks and tonks snapped against the gondola as musket balls bounced off its bronze-plated flanks. A kerosene lamp hooked to the gondola prow shattered with the high crash of breaking glass, its kerosene falling loose of the fuel canister in a wobbling pancake of liquid.

  And there was another sound, a far worse sound for the soul of a zeppelin captain—the rip of puncturing fabric. Bullets punching through the envelope overhead. Bullets coated with burning phosphorus.

  Buckle ducked back into the gondola. “Ambush! Port and starboard! Gunn
ers let them have it!” he shouted into the chattertube mouthpiece.

  Buckle did not actually have to say the last bit—the Pneumatic Zeppelin crew, weapons at the ready, were already returning fire, aiming at the sources of the telltale smoke puffs and phosphorus streaks. He heard the low, burping bumpf of his crew’s muskets replying to the attackers, combined with the sound of the Ballblasters triggering their firearms in a measured response outside.

  “Lower the nets!” Buckle ordered, his hand instinctively reaching to the polished brass butt of the pistol in his belt. This was the perilous window of opportunity for the Scavengers, who could attempt to board and seize the earthbound air machine. That is, if the Scavengers had any desire to charge the ship rather than take potshots at it.

  “Lowering nets! Aye, Captain!” Sabrina shouted, reaching over her head to pull down a lapis-lazuli-handled lever.

  Reels of chain-mail netting rattled as they unrolled down both flanks of the gondola, driven along slender rails by metal pulleys spewing steam. Within thirty seconds, the antiboarding netting would seal the underside of the airship, making a ground breach rather difficult.

  It would also strand any of Pluteus’s men outside if they had not made it aboard yet.

  “Ivan! Thirty seconds!” Buckle shouted into the chattertube. His chief mechanic and brother, Ivan Gorky, another one of Balthazar’s orphans, would be manning the open rear hatch of the engine gondola at that very moment, a blackbang pistol in one hand, his other yanking Pluteus and his troopers aboard into the narrow gangway corridor.

  “Ten seconds, Cap’n!” Ivan’s voice, tinged with a Russian-throated grumble, returned in the chattertube. “Ten seconds and you’re good to go!”

  “Ten seconds!” Buckle repeated, his voice suddenly sounding loud in his ears—the racket of the gunfight had quieted: muskets were being hastily reloaded on both sides. His nose stinging with the punch of gunpowder, his blood a cavalry charge of adrenaline, Buckle paced the deck. He needed to get his zeppelin up and off the damned ground. He glanced over the port gunwale, his view partially obscured by drifts of black-bang-powder haze. Not a Scavenger could be seen, but there had to be at least fifty of them.

  Buckle didn’t want any more of the Scavenger’s muskets.

  But the thunder of the firearms started up again. Buckle heard another ball zip through the fabric skin somewhere above his head, chink against something metal, and drop at his boots, a deformed and smoldering lead orb.

  Ivan’s voice rattled in the chattertube: “Everyone aboard!”

  “About time,” Buckle muttered. “All ahead flank!” He snatched the chadburn handle and slammed it back and forward three times, ringing the bell three times. “Now, Nero! Up ship! Emergency ascent. Increase hydro twenty percent across the board. Jettison ballast five and six.”

  “Bouncing, aye!” Nero shouted, rapidly flipping levers on the hydrogen and water-ballast boards.

  Dunn grunted as he wound the elevator wheel to maximum lift.

  Buckle braced his feet as the deck lurched to a steep angle. The engines and propellers, now throttled up all the way, rose to an eardrum-throbbing roar. He heard a deep whoosh as rivers of water thundered from the amidships ballast tanks, their scupper hatches wide open, cascading to the earth below. Released from the water weight, straining with acceleration, and given a vertical punch with extra hydrogen in its gas cells, the Pneumatic Zeppelin lunged upward.

  Buckle heard the heavy, metallic chunk, chunk, chunk of the compressed-steam hammergun belting away as Max, now elevated enough to use the cannon from the belly turret, rained razor-sharp harpoons down upon the attackers. The hammergun had a limited range, but it employed a long, expensive belt of ammunition and was blessed with a near-continuous rate of fire, unlike the blackball muskets that took even an experienced shooter more than half a minute to reload. As for range, well, this skirmish—like most skirmishes—was almost point-blank.

  “Forty feet and rising!” Sabrina shouted over the noise. “Emergency ascent in progress.”

  A Scavenger’s musket ball, perhaps the last shot fired in the melee, struck a glass panel in the cockpit dome, leaving a spiderwebbed crack.

  “Scurrilous derelicts!” Romulus Buckle shouted in disgust.

  UMBILICAL

  WITH THE PNEUMATIC ZEPPELIN AIRBORNE, Buckle felt much better. “Serafim. You have the bridge,” he ordered, unplugging his top hat from the mainline.

  “Aye, Captain,” Sabrina said. Welly slid into the chief navigator’s chair, as was the protocol.

  Buckle refastened his scabbard on its gargoyle pegs. “At three hundred, raise boarding nets and reduce to all ahead full. I will be in engineering. I must speak with Pluteus immediately.”

  Sabrina nodded. “Aye, Captain. Give my regards.”

  “I’ll keep your name out of it. He’s not going to like the news,” Buckle said.

  “Aye,” Sabrina replied.

  Buckle turned between the staircase and the hammergun turret and entered the narrow passageway at the back of the piloting gondola. On his right was the door to the map room, currently unoccupied, and on his left was the door to the signals room where the signals officer, Jacob Fitzroy, a skinny, territorial kid of sixteen years, sat amidst codebooks, signal flares, message scrolls, mirrors, and pigeon cages.

  “How are your crazy birds, Fitzroy?” Buckle ducked his head in and asked.

  “Regurgitating and crapping all over everything, sir,” Fitzroy replied. “They don’t like the muskets.”

  “Very good. Carry on,” Buckle said, and strode to the end of the passageway, turning the crank on the round umbilical hatch until the main latch released. He swung the hatch open and Kellie bounded out between his legs. Buckle swung the hatch shut and turned. He paused, blinking. It took the brain a moment to process the void after he’d been cooped up in the narrow gondola for hours on end. The forward umbilical ramp was a flexible metal footbridge, rocking back and forth over the chasm of open sky between the piloting and gunnery gondolas. The ramp was now at a considerable angle due to the steep climb of the airship, and Buckle had to plant both hands on the rails to steady himself. Great rushes of icy wind passed him on both sides as they swept around the gondola and blustered along the length of the ramp, making every one of its thousands of metal hinges rattle and creak. The massive ellipsoidal belly of the envelope dwarfed everything from overhead, while the high rumble of her forward maneuvering propellers vibrated the air from their nacelles on both sides.

  It would have been easier to climb the piloting gondola staircase up to the main keel corridor and stroll through the warm, enclosed interior of the zeppelin to the engineering gondola staircase at the stern. It would have been easier. But from the umbilical, Buckle could better inspect whatever damage the Scavengers might have done to his airship. And it was faster.

  Buckle dropped a quick glance at the Boneyard, now two hundred feet below: the occasional puff of blackbang smoke popped here and there against the white landscape, but the range now rendered the shots ineffective. He scrutinized the underside of the zeppelin envelope as it loomed above him: the metal-plated skin was designed to be open in many places on the bottom, and he could often catch glimpses of the fourteen-story-high interior. From here, the Pneumatic Zeppelin always seemed to him to be some kind of hoax planet, pulled down from the sky and discovered to be actually a huge, complicated construction of fabric, girders, gasbags, catwalks, pulleys, rigging, and wires—a colossal feat of otherworldly engineering. Sweeping banks of gleaming bronze steam tubes, whistling copper vents, and dripping water-ballast scuppers running above the umbilical ramp made the impression even more fantastic.

  Mostly, though, he was relieved that the only visible damage to his sky vessel seemed to be a few scattered musket ball holes.

  The Pneumatic Zeppelin leveled out at three hundred feet, and the last few steps of Buckle’s ramp journey got much easier. He reached the umbilical hatch in the nose of the amidships gunnery gondola, flipped t
he latch, and entered as Kellie darted in between his legs.

  Stepping over breeching ropes and pulleys, Buckle hurried down the middle of the gunnery gondola to reach the aft umbilical hatch in its tail. The forty-foot-long gondola was teardrop shaped and streamlined, but shorter and broader than the piloting gondola, housing the four twelve-pounder blackbang cannons—two on each side, their brass muzzles nosed back from the open firing ports—and a host of firing hatches and slots. The chamber stank with the acrid sulfur of ignited blackbang powder. The crew within, eighteen stalwarts, both male and female, were busy cleaning their recently fired muskets and delicately unloading the cannons: the skirmish had not required the expenditure of the expensive cannonballs—a good judgment call by the experienced master gunner, Tyler Considine, and a husbanding of resources appreciated by his captain.

  The gun-team members were all regular airship crewmen—hydros, riggers, skinners, and more—trained in gunnery as their post when the call to battle stations came. Buckle traded a quick salute with the chief skinner and captain of gun crew number three, Ensign Marian Boyd, a petite twenty-two-year-old spitfire with cropped brown hair and pale cheeks roughened by freezing wind. She had a touch of a snarl in her smile that reflected her ability to rappel across the cliff-like flank of a diving zeppelin or stare down a brawny boilerman with cool, daredevil ease.

  Skinners, the crewmen tasked with maintaining the mountainous fabric envelope that was the hide of the entire airship, usually possessed colorful personalities, and their propensity for calculated gambles reflected the dangerous nature of their business. It was normal for a skinner to be good at his or her job—lousy skinners usually, and quickly, ended up as pockmarks on the Snow World landscape below.

  “Gun number three secure, Captain,” Boyd said as Buckle strode past.

  “Very good,” Buckle replied. He always forgot how small she was—her personality being so big—until he was right next to her. “Where is Mister Considine?”

  “Up in the magazine, sir,” Boyd answered. “Was the package picked up successfully, sir?”